Albatross

Neo-Confederate Jack Hunter is still on Rand Paul’s Senate staff. But he’d now like you to forget his annual birthday toast to John Wilkes Booth for murdering Abraham Lincoln, along with lots of other opinions that might impede his boss’s White House ambitions. The editor who published some of Hunter’s work – the work that led Rand Paul to hire him in the first place – explains why he won’t take it down, and why the Jack Hunter/Rand Paul “I’m-not-really-a-racist” racism is just a coward’s version of the original article.

Let me repeat: Jack Hunter is still on Rand Paul’s Senate staff. And Rand Paul is still in good standing both as a Republican and as a libertarian.

The Confederatistas perpetuate the white southernersâ€™ two-century-long scam of dressing up the cause of racial dominance in classical liberal clothes, perverting the goal of liberty into the project of slavery. This has been a defining fact of American political life; it has served to discredit some of those classical liberal values and institutions, while also perpetuating a story in which the freedom of African-Americans (postbellum as well as antebellum) lies somehow outside the calculus of American liberty.

Like Ilya Somin, though more cautiously, Levy likens the cult of the Lost Cause among the deranged Right with the cult of Che on the deranged Left. Yes, there’s an analogy. But there’s also a key difference. No Democratic Senator would hire someone in a Che T-shirt.